A miserable failure of Agile

That is really something we come across almost every single day – the initiatives and ideas that seemed so good backfire and destroy all they were supposed to improve. One of those things is Agile in software development.

The idea originally was fairly trivial but seemed to have potential to work. The idea was to be able to split the software development into smaller chunks so that even an idiot would be able to write that small piece of code. Then, a company would not need to hire experienced software developments but could settle for inexperienced, inadequately trained and simply stupid developers, often without an engineering degree. That would allow to pay less for the same amount of software produced.

The result? A catastrophic loss of productivity ensues. Yes, it is cheap to get the software developers and make them scrum masters but what then? They are not capable of developing the software anyway. And you drove away all real masters of design already. The amount of time required to write and rewrite all the code and tests shoots through the roof. The productivity falls through the floor. Costs … you guess it.

Software design (as many other engineering disciplines) remains an art to this day. Yes, you can apply agile principles in some dark corners of software development but far from everywhere. And that is something managers still have to understand.